Mystery and Warmth

 On Eamon Grennan’s “Visitation” accessible at http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14949

            Firstly, I loved this poem’s simple elegance. It begins simply to state events, without much music or contrivances. But our first simile, the geese “like mystery/I thought”, is a powerful one, and reverberates throughout the poem. The poem continues simply, with a few more similes and a bit more music, but never tangling itself up with conceit upon conceit. A careful reading will reveal the careful use of alliteration, “but we know no more the meaning”, and upon the geese’ departure anaphora, “they’re gone, gone dark, gone on”, which I took to mimic the stammering confusion of the ignorant, the mystified.

This poem is so interesting because it allows us to look directly through the speaker’s eyes, and only through that very narrow lens. We, with the speaker, are looking only up at the geese flying overhead. We do not get to turn our heads down, or to the side. There are questions begged, but left all but unanswered. Who are we? Is it a point of controversy, contention, or a regular occurrence that we “share” the birds? Then of course there are the actual questions of the piece. Why do the birds look so different at night? How are the birds lit the way they are?

            These questions, indeed, are the crux of the poem. For it is truly a poem about mystery. The poet does not expect, nor give, complete answers. The geese are above “us”, and us; they are in some ways intangible, unknowable. Indeed there seems to be something magical to the event. “We” were there only by chance. “We”, and we, know we cannot begin to understand or explain the phenomenon. We can only ask questions, scratch our heads as the birds fly on by.

            The poem defines mystery as:

“a lit thing bearing nothing but the self
we see and savor but know no more the meaning of
than I know what in the cave of its fixed gaze
our cat is thinking”

This idea of mystery is without a doubt the central idea of the poem. By this definition the geese are certainly a mystery. They are lit from below and we cannot begin to imagine what they mean. But towards the end of the poem, I think the poet wants to emphasize a different word in his definition: “savor”. The poet describes the atmosphere after the geese had gone as “for a little while neither cold/ nor dark”. Witnessing the mysterious has warmed “us” up, has allowed “us”, and us, to savor the moment. He calls it “a place of visitation”, and as this is the title it has added weight. The place of visitation is the site of the mystery, the site of something special. However, it almost goes without saying, that a visitation is something fleeting, something temporary and surely so is the feeling to be savored.